At last, the perfect pizza at home!!
My perfect pizza
About 7 years ago, I treated myself to a Forno Toscano Margherita wood fired pizza oven. I have to admit I used it mostly for slow roasting, hot holding, baking bread and everything but pizza making. The key reason being I was completely unfamiliar with proper pizza making.
This year I was determined to find and develop the perfect stone baked dough recipe. By chance I stumbled on a Neopolitan recipe and set about experimenting. Opportunities for lighting the oven were intermittent, so friends and family were invited to be guinea pigs and objective opinions and screwed up faces were welcomed.
My reason for writing this blog today? After nearly 7 years of ownership, and as of Saturday, the 17th August 2019 at ten to eight in the evening, I created the perfect pizza and garlic buttery bread. I’m now very content and there’s no holding me back. A little bit of Italy landed in my back garden and my friends, wife and kids were all amazed at the finished pizzas. The critics were happy and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Start of the evening, Mis en Place done, chef nervous, waiting for guests to arrive.
I have now used the same recipe 6 times this year and like all good chefs, wanted to develop the same recipe without deviation from its Italian lineage.
The only thing I did differently on Saturday was have a a bigger fire at the back of the oven. This created a very hot environment – just under £500 degrees C.
8.55pm. Successful evening. Last pizza baking.
The other key difference was maintaining the heat to ensure a continuous temperature. Eureka, I didn’t have the oven hot enough for the same dough recipe to work and the use of kiln dried oak logs made a huge difference.
So what now? I will continue to use the oven for slow roasting & bread baking, which it is brilliant for, but I’m out of the blocks and now looking at Calzone recipes. Watch this space. In previous blogs, I wrote about my own kitchen garden and this year I’ve got a glut of plum and Moneymaker tomatoes so will experiment making the perfect pizza sauce this Autumn.
If you trained as a chef at college, you’ll remember browning meringue under a salamander grill for the first time, taking your eyes of it for 5 seconds and ending up with black meringue instead of nut brown. Well the same thing happened to me on Saturday. It wasn’t ‘high bake’ – it was incinerated caramel which the birds enjoyed the day after. It was my wife’s idea to use onion marmalade instead of the conventional tomato sauce base. I was dispatched to make another which turned out perfect. Marmalade jam, goats cheese and sun dried tomato pizza is sensational.
So, this middle aged ex chef still has that determination all chefs need to exploit, develop and master a recipe to perfection. A legacy of this amazing industry.
Do you have similar stories to tell?
Thanks for reading.
Paul
